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Individualism

Georg Simmel

T
RANSLATOR’S NOTE: First published as ‘Individualismus’, in Marsyas, vol.
1, July/August 1917, pp. 33–9; also in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, vol.
13, Klaus Latzel ed., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000, pp. 299–306.
Simmel wrote this essay before ‘Germanic and Classical Romanic Style’
(1918, also translated in this issue), but it is in some ways best understood when
read after the latter. Rather than presenting an abstract sociological theory of indi-
vidualism in the manner of Simmel’s 1908 Soziologie, particularly the last chapter
on ‘The Expansion of the Group and the Formation of Individuality’ (partially trans-
lated in Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, Donald N. Levine ed.,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), the essay dwells on expressive differ-
ences between a Germanic idea of individuality and a more typically Latinate
Romanic idea. Simmel argues that where the Latinate Romanic idea of the individ-
ual defines individuality by reference to a general or universal formal principle of
some kind, Germanic consciousness elicits individuality purely by reference to the
incomparable inner deeds of a person, or to what Goethe called die Tat. The
discussion developed here is thus closely linked to his earlier essay on ‘Goethe and
Youth’ (1914, translated in this issue), and to the more extensive discussion in ‘Das
individuelle Gesetz’ (‘The Individual Law’) in Lebensanschauung: Vier metaphysis-
che Kapitel (Life-View: Four Metaphysical Chapters; Berlin: Duncker & Humblot,
1918).
Key terms in this essay are the different combinations of the words ‘individ-
ual’, ‘particular’, ‘general’ and ‘universal’, from the German nouns and adjectives
‘Individuum’, ‘einzelne’, ‘besondere’ and ‘allgemeine’.
* * *

A
N ITALIAN chronicler of the early Renaissance tells us how
Florence for several years knew no real fashions in male attire as
every man chose to dress in his own unique manner. This is a
significant statement for a time that had begun to release itself from the
binding forms of the medieval community, for a time when individuals
believed in no limits to the possibilities of presenting themselves to others
with character, distinction and independence. Yet when one looks at

■ Theory, Culture & Society 2007 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 24(7–8): 66–71
DOI: 10.1177/0263276407084473

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portraits from the period, displaying people largely as they wanted to be

seen, and when one thinks about how they appear in literature of the period,
one cannot fail to notice a certain uniformity of style in them. How their
forms appear to us, their entire disposition and gestures, and the impression
of the details in the whole – all of this announces a common ethos and
attitude to life, a general atmosphere that frames, shapes and infuses each
of their passionate accentuations of individuality. It is this element of
commonality, despite all individualization, that in the end leads individuals
to present themselves as bearers of a type, with a more or less generalized
character or temperament. In Romanic ways of life – not unlike classical
Greek life – there lies a basic striving for the general, for the type. Here the
‘general’ does not mean a collectivity or any practical amalgamation into an
encompassing figuration, or a merging of individuals into some greater
totality; it means rather the generality of the concept, involving a determin-
ing form or a law for an indefinite number of individually led lives, of which
each individual is more or less a representative, whether by nature or by
willed effort. All individual freedom, distinction and excellence are sought
within these limits, and are in fact nothing other than particularly pure and
strong manifestations of typical nameable attributes.
All that is called individuality, as a state of being, a sensibility, or as
an aspiration, expresses a quality of behaviour irreducible to any more
primordial instinct, one that is unknown among non-human animals. On the
one hand, it always means relating to a more or less larger or smaller world
in ways that can be either practical or ideal, negative or affirmative, ruling
or subservient, indifferent or passionate; but on the other hand, it also means
that individuals comprise a world for themselves and are centred in them-
selves, as self-sufficient unitary beings. This double existence disrupts the
earthly life of every recognizably ‘single’ reflective being; for on the one
hand, all individuals rest within themselves, whether formally or substan-
tively, as unities with a certain intrinsic being, meaning or purpose of their
own; but on the other hand, they are parts of one or many wholes that exist
outside of them as an encompassing totality towering above them. They are
always at once member and body, part and whole, complete and incomplete.
Individuality is what we call the form in which an attempt is made to unify
these dual poles of human existence. This may occur in a great variety of
ways and nuances: a person’s conscious life may take a completely rounded
shape of its own and not ‘concern itself’ in any way with ‘the world’; or it
may see its individually meaningful being through a comparison with others,
in a relation of superordination over or parity to, of inclusion within or
service toward, a more transcendent whole. But however differently these
two elements may relate to one another, whether in the dominance of the
one over the other, or in the equilibrium or harmony of both, or in the tragic
destructiveness of both, individuality always means, in an at once definite
and indefinite sense, that a person experiences both elements as one. The
person experiences both an inner centredness, self-sufficiency and a world
of his or her own, and an either positive or negative relationship to a totality

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68 Theory, Culture & Society 24(7–8)

in which he or she belongs, whether in adherence to it or detachment

from it.
We may observe at this point that the concept of individuality preva-
lent among the Romanic peoples since the Renaissance stands in complete
contrast to the concept that abounds in the Germanic world. Certainly the
classical Romanic form has been an object of ardent attachment and faith
for Nordic peoples too; but everything that has developed on our native soil
differs from it in character, in different degrees and ways. Rembrandt’s
depiction of the human figure, fusing soul to body and body to soul;
Beethoven’s depths of musical yearning and formative impulse; Herder’s and
Schleiermacher’s conceptions of the human essence; Walther von der
Vogelweide’s pictures of existence, and those of the German romantics in
general, and of Kierkegaard, Ibsen and Selma Lagerlöf – none of these
evinces any orientation to a law of form or style capable of permeating it in
some general way, such that it becomes a mere example of this law. By
contrast, in the youthful figures displayed in the friezes of the Parthenon,
in the statue of Sophocles, in Leonardo’s figures in The Last Supper, in the
characters of classical French drama, or of Titian or Balzac, we notice only
different kinds of membership of definite genres of human being – even
though language can describe these genres only with very rudimentary
concepts, if at all. All these human figures or characters are suffused by a
more general ideal sphere, which they themselves substantiate or crystal-
lize at particular instants. The individualistic drive to separation, autarchy
and self-reliance here obtains ultimately not for the isolated individual but
for the human type as such, which he or she represents or illustrates in some
exemplary way. This vision and moulding of the human being has conse-
quently been able to grip much wider circles of humanity and to play a much
larger part in the formation of the European ideal of civilization than
Germanic individualism. For the latter seeks individuality only within the
unique self, and is deeply indifferent as to whether this implies a type of
some kind or to whether individuals can exist more than ‘just once’ in the
world in a numerical sense.
It is this indifference that distinguishes Germanic individualism from
the Florentine type epitomized by the story told at the outset of these lines.
The men of the Renaissance wanted to be completely singular, just as
Bernini two centuries later wanted his portrait busts to elicit in all his
subjects ‘that which nature gave to each alone’. Yet Bernini was not
conscious of the way his Italian world oriented every individual life to a
thoroughly typical and general principle of form. Never could Rembrandt
have had this as his goal. In his eyes, the Germanic individualism in which
his art excels could have meant only that an individual life grows from its
own roots, responsible to itself alone, unpreoccupied by whatever phenom-
ena such roots might have pushed up among people of any comparable
nature. As much as Romanic individualists assert their autarchy, sincerity
or otherworldliness, something general always seems to shine through them
that gives us access to them. One feels a lucidity of formed, crafted

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rationality in the Romanic figure, whose reticence and uncanniness are

always obvious as reticence and uncanniness, even if their content cannot
be fathomed. In Germanic personalities, on the other hand, no such bridge
is forthcoming: one has to approach them by their own path to themselves,
otherwise one loses them. Germanic characters feel the double character of
individual life in such a way that, even as they obey fully a law of the whole
and answer and adapt to an existence higher than their own, they become
themselves exclusively through themselves. Their existence they owe
perhaps to the cosmos, to society, to the divine order, but certainly not to
an idea with the function of subsuming an indefinite number of individuals
under its extension. Individualism in the Italian Renaissance was socio-
logical in character: it consisted in looking and being different and distinc-
tive; it involved an act of individual self-comparison to others, and thus
presupposed something general and norm-giving, exterior to individuals, in
relation to which they could measure their particularity.
Naturally this dichotomy is not clear-cut: it denotes, and isolates
purely conceptually, only certain extreme forms of individuality that never
appear in reality in any unconditional way but only in innumerable grada-
tions and combinations. The German spirit in particular has acquired a
yearning from its relations with the classical and Italianate world to educate
itself in this other form of individualism, which has as often enriched it as
it has divided it against itself. One cannot think of a more deeply German
person than Kant: he vested the absolute singular worth of man in the
absolutely inner moral conscience of the personality, creating a figure of
tremendous solitude uninfluenceable in the slightest way by either divine
commandment or care for personal benefit, by either opinion or historical
circumstances. Yet to the question of how this dutiful consciousness, this
ethical auto-legislation of the individual, was to be shaped and decided, he
answered: only act on that maxim that you can at the same time will to be
a universal law – only on that maxim that you could reasonably wish
everyone, without difference of personhood, to follow, in the same situation
and in the same manner. Here can be seen that other idea of individuality
that expresses itself in subordination to a universally valid norm, reflected
in a supra-personal type. To be sure, this law does not emanate from any
extraneous power, and does not deflect the personality from its course; it is
a law of complete autonomy flowing from the last unadulterated sources of
the worth of the ego. But still the direction of this flow is not determined by
the self’s individual quality. ‘Law’ and ‘universal law’ here stand in soli-
darity to one another. What is excluded is the possibility that the particu-
lar languages in which all particular human beings express themselves
might inform the character not only of their existence but also of their
morality. Where the brave action for Plato derived its ultimate essence and
value from the general idea of bravery and not from the singular life of the
singular human being that beats with it, so for Kant the morally lawful action
arises from the universally moral law, by which alone a human being comes
to belong to the type of human being possessed of reason. What the Kantian

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70 Theory, Culture & Society 24(7–8)

moral theory cannot recognize is that persons might give an ‘individual law’
to themselves, a law evolving exclusively from the individual’s character,
without this law forfeiting in any way its ideality and stringency or its
possible agreement of content with the general law. In Kant’s teaching, the
classical Romanic general concept and supra-individual type have seduced
the pure Germanic concept of individuality away from what is Kant’s actual
ultimate fundament, namely, the insight that individual meaning and value
ultimately grow from individual roots alone. Kant’s teaching here affirms
individualism only to the extent that it rejects all ethical norms that might
address the individual from outside of itself; it leaves the inward side of
individuality, however, once again prey to a generalizing idea, and only
captures the value of individuality by dint of its dispersion into something
general.
This is also, ultimately, the same predicament, the same never-
quite-resolved fissure to be found in Goethe’s life picture, otherwise so
different from Kant’s. Goethe’s youth saw an impetuous waxing of his ego
and at the same time a passionate quest for this ego, wanting to become
ever purer, ever more potent and ever more filled with God. The raw
forces of his autonomous individuality produced his character and creativ-
ity, his happiness and his torments. So radical was his individualism that
at the age of 18, he became indignant at the thought that one day his
children might resemble anyone other than himself. Yet this truly
Germanic passion took a different turn after the Italian Journey. True, not
all his individualism went this way: in his great old age he could still
declare that just as every man had to live from within himself, so the artist
had to ‘cultivate always his own individuality’. But this vision changed
after the encounter with classicism and Italian art: Goethe’s later works’
characters, as sharply delineated and ‘vitally spontaneous’ as they may be,
become more and more like types, fashioned after a formal law that is
unrestricted to any singularity. Each character stands for a universal;
alongside this sit admittedly other universals, but it is only in this supra-
individual general idea that each character finds its meaning and value.
In his middle age Goethe resorted to this species of individualism because
he could not shape that of his youth into a perspicuous form with firm
laws. In the development of his deep German spirit, he had to expunge
those features that make German existence difficult to understand and
approach for others. But he did not pull this off smoothly. It was an immea-
surably important achievement to fuse the German and classical genres of
existence into a new configuration of culture, but something was irrevoca-
bly lost in the undertaking, something of the immediate power of the self,
of the soul’s unhindered dilation and movement. The gain in the loss was
enormous – but the loss in the gain was not exiguous. Both Goethe’s
biographical individualism and that of his characters showed, at least here
and there, a certain splintering after this point. To be sure, it continued
to nourish itself from the inner life, but this interiority simultaneously
had to bear something general, something permeating the interior, like a

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law that fashions the individual form according to a type, however

differentiated a type – and it is in this type alone, not in any singular point
of existence, that the form finds its legitimacy.
It is a strange turn of fate for the German spirit that has made another
form of individuality, one equal in standing to its own, gradually become its
undoing. To live in the Germanic manner is indisputably more dangerous,
dark and burdened with responsibility than to live in the classical Romanic
manner. When the will of the roots weakens and the inner voice fades, when
contact is lost somehow with that hazy feeling of the cosmic value of this
being-alone-with-oneself in the ground of the world – it is at just this
moment that one becomes tempted by that other individualism that imbues
particularity with the framework of a general style, that supports personal
force with an at least ideal generality, for which the individual life becomes
an example, illustration or condensation. The Romanic form of individual-
ity allows individuals to prove their raison d’être, so to speak, whereas in
the Germanic form they can only ever refer to the deed [die Tat], to action,
and are otherwise left to their own devices, in a solitary feeling and
consciousness of self. If Romanic people cannot accomplish a distinctive
deed, they can always have recourse to a supra-individual sphere that bears
and encircles their existence and enables an inviting amiability and access-
ible cultivatedness, which we Germans often feel to be typical in languid
substanceless characters of the South, who for us seem devoid of real
personality. If Germans, on the other hand, cannot prove themselves through
a distinctive deed – through a creative achievement, action or exemplary
conduct – they lack any such way of broadcasting the core of their individ-
uality. Their nucleus remains as within a shell, which is hard for others,
especially for the foreigner, to peel away. It is not that Germans are ‘more
individualistic’ in general than other nations – there can be no suggestion
of this. It is only that European civilization has produced two different solu-
tions to the concept of the individual as a mirroring of ego and world – a
Romanic solution and a Germanic solution. Even when German individuals
comply ‘selflessly’ with laws, forms and totalities and thereby manage to stay
faithful to themselves, they ultimately orient themselves to a responsibility
evolving from their own point of gravity – whereas responsibility for the
classical Romanic ideal is more or less the point of ignition for a universal
style and for a shared and ideal formal law, the point at which the type and
supra-individual idea of individuality light up with radiant meaning and
majesty.
Translated by Austin Harrington

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